Woman returns tourists’ camera after extensive search online

By Nadia Arandjelovic

If you found a lost wallet, keys or camera how far would you go to return it to the owners? Good Samaritan Liz Carpio recently proved she was willing to stop at nothing to locate two tourists from off a cruise ship, who had left their digital camera at the Brown & Company store last month.

After no one claimed the camera before the cruise ship left Bermuda, Ms Carpio, a senior executive secretary and operational administrator at the Phoenix Stores, decided to look through the pictures for clues that would help identify the couple.

She said: “There were lots of pictures of Bermuda, but then I came across two major pictures that led me to finding them.

“One was a picture of a cake with ‘Happy Anniversary, Nicole and Colin’ written on it. The other was a photo of two girls wearing a polo short with a company name and phone numbers on them. I went online to check out that company and saw that it was based in New Jersey.”

From there, Ms Carpio e-mailed the New Jersey office to see if a woman named Nicole was working there. Unfortunately all roads came up blocked.

She persevered after a week of searching and decided to look online for ‘Nicole and Colin in New Jersey’.

“There were a lot of results and a few wedding registries for couples with that name at places like Macy’s and J C Penny’s, but the pages were no longer active,” she said.

“I was lucky enough to come across a page that had a picture of people that resembled the couple. Their names were Nicole Cordobes and Colin Hunt.”

With a potential name in hand, Ms Carpio put back on her investigator’s hat.

It was then she stumbled on a marriage announcement for the couple online in a Jewish publication. She also learned they were married early last month.

From there she was also able to locate Ms Cordobes’ mother and heard directly from the couple soon after.

Ms Carpio said: “The next day I got an e-mail from Nicole. I asked her to send me a description of the camera and she did.

“She also sent me some pictures of them, so I knew I had found the right people.

“She was very grateful and happy because she had wrote off the camera when she went back and didn’t think she would find it.

“After searching and finding out they were newlyweds it was all the more worthwhile. I would want someone to do that same thing for me.”

She sent the camera back to the couple by mail and the package arrived in New Jersey last week.

When asked what motivated her to go so far to find the camera’s owners, Ms Carpio said that was just part of her nature.

“I always hope that if something happened to me someone would help me out in the same way,” she said. “There’s nothing worse, in my opinion, when you have lost something or something happens to you and you are in a bind and there’s no one to assist you.”